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Napolitano: Sending out furlough notices

With about $85 billion in spending cuts — and no new revenue — kicking into gear on Friday, it appears that the exuberance expressed by many Democrats at the beginning of the year was misplaced. Efforts to avert the sequester never achieved liftoff, and Democrats are realizing that new tax revenues are off the table for the immediate future.

“We lost the bet on just how intransigent the Republican majority can be,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) told POLITICO. “We made a mistake betting on reasonable compromise ultimately prevailing. We bet on that and we lost.”

The sequester was initially set to take effect on Jan. 1, but the fiscal cliff deal bought two months for Congress to find an alternative. That delay was paid for through spending cuts as well as a new tax on some retirement savings.

At the time, President Barack Obama said the deal “enshrines … a principle into law that will remain in place as long as I am president: The deficit needs to be reduced in a way that’s balanced.”

Republicans now scoff at the idea that the fiscal cliff established any type of precedent when it comes to tapping revenue to cut the deficit. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, dismissed the idea of a precedent as “bull.”

“They haven’t established anything,” he said. “All they’ve established is they want to spend at all costs, and they keep themselves in power by spending it and saying how compassionate they are with everybody else’s money.”

"There will be no last-minute, backroom deal and absolutely no agreement to increase taxes," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday as he prepared to meet with congressional leaders and Obama at the White House.

The sequester was designed to be a fail-safe — an outcome that scared both parties so much that they would each have incentives to strike a fiscal compromise to avoid it. But the failure of the 2011 supercommittee was the first strike against that line of thinking. And even Obama’s reelection and the fiscal cliff deal weren’t enough to stave off the cuts.

Republicans flexed their muscle in the Senate on Thursday, blocking a Democratic measure that would have replaced the sequester through 2013 with a more palatable mix of spending cuts and revenue increases. A competing measure offered by Republicans that would have given Obama wide latitude in implementing the cuts also wasn’t allowed to proceed.

Democratic leaders were left to drag out the same rhetoric they employed in the weeks before the cliff deal, blaming Republicans for another round of Washington gridlock based on an ideological opposition to new taxes. Only this time, it’s not at all clear that the strategy will soon pay dividends.